Hong Kong rain is colour coded. This morning it was raining so hard that raging torrents rushed down normally dry drainage gullies and the steep mountain sides were transformed by the sudden appearance of multiple waterfalls. We had umbrellas but still got soaked as we waited for the nursery bus. This was Amber rain: more than 30 mm falling in an hour. The danger is more to do with landslides than any fear of getting wet. I can’t wait for Red.
The persistent low cloud and grey mist of recent weeks are getting to us all.
Last week I turned my ankle over playing tennis. More than painful. I applied ice and hoped for the best. It is now the size of a balloon and I can’t hike, play tennis or do yoga. The other foot has swollen up either in sympathy, or else because it just doesn’t like it here. It’s not a good look and I feet fat and frantic and distinctly short of the endorphins I require on a daily basis.
One option is to sit on the sofa with my injured foot raised on a cushion while I watch films and eat comfort food: I have developed an appetite for baked potatoes smothered in butter and salt, Mmmmm. This may be an unwise long term strategy when I consider my latest attempts at shopping for summer clothes in Hong Kong. When asked what size I was I replied, somewhat optimistically, S sometimes, maybe M? The sales assistant looked me up and down and replied, An Asian L. Help! I have become LARGE without even properly indulging my baked potato fetish. So unfair.
Shopping for shoes is no more satisfactory although the thought of squeezing my ugly sister feet into a glass slipper is not appealing right now. When I named my size the assistant’s reaction was, Size 39? We don’t stock larger sizes. I’ll have to call the warehouse. So now I’m an L with enormous feet. None of this is helping my self-esteem.
My skin hates this place and has rediscovered its misspent youth in the form of adolescent spots which are not mixing well with the 41 year old lines that are making themselves at home on my face. I sit in the plastic surgeon’s swanky waiting room reading leaflets on liposuction, face lifts and tummy tucks and wonder if he’ll give me a discount for a job lot. Instead he removes my daughter’s plaster, dabs ointment on the stitches before banging on a new plaster and charging me a cool HK$500. I could have done that for nothing.
That’s the physical side but mentally things are little better. I am fretting about schools. Having decided we must move our 10 year old I have fought off the boarding school debate and am left with an inadequate choice of places to send him. In London we were spoilt for choice. Here we are not and anyway most schools have a waiting list as long as your arm. We’ll have left by the time we get him in to any of them. I thought we’d decided. My husband did too. And now I’m having a major wobble of ‘the devil you know’ sort. I need my husband to talk me off this particular ledge but he is cross at the illogical nature of my concerns and thinks I have cried wolf. I have been left to stew.
The 10 year old is asserting his independence and newly discovered sense of style and has cut his own hair. At school. With a pencil sharpener blade. His first attempts were quite good but success went to his head and he tried again. Now he just looks odd.
I am forced to conclude it is a pathetic fallacy type of day. I’d better draw a veil over it and hope that tomorrow is not a Black rain day.
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5 comments:
OMG I don't know what to say ...except I feel your pain and I'm sorry!
Why do husbands cling on so hopelessly to the raft of logic?
I think your size dilemmas is rather a metaphor for expat life. You haven't changed at all (well, perhaps the swollen feet), but somehow the ground around you has shifted. In a new situation, you're the same, but by everyone else's definition, you're different. So that means you ARE different. It feels so unfair.
My mother used to think that the damp climate was good for the skin (made it younger, less wrinkly etc). But I do well remember those murky days of dehumidifiers.
Hope you come to a satisfactory conclusion on schools. My experience was that friends who went to 'Island School' (if that still exists) for secondary ended up at University of Bristol with me, who had been sent away because schools in the UK were thought more academic. But, in those days, there were plenty of bright expat children who went to those schools. I don't know what it is like now.
I got psoriosis & eczema when livign in Sri Lanka. And I have been off tennis for 6 wks having pulled a calf muscle. I even warmed up,but it still went, so unfair! It doesn't do one's mood much good. But yes the humid climate is definetely better for plumping out wrinkles!
Anyway just to say I sympathise!
Thanks girls. It's good to have you with me in such low moments.
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